Paid Search Spend Rises 8 Percent In Q1, Mobile Shows Signs Of Maturing [Report]
In the first quarter this year, U.S. search advertising spend rose 8 percent when compared both quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) and year-over-year (YoY) according to IgnitionOne’s latest report which looks at the campaigns run through its digital marketing platform. In Q1 2014, paid search clicks increased 5 percent and click-through-rates (CTR) were up 23 percent YoY while […]

Google’s Matt Cutts On How They Evaluate New Search Algorithms
Google Head of Search Spam Matt Cutts posted a video today answering how Google goes about evaluating which new search algorithms they use and which they throw away or adapt. The question was posed by James Foster of Sydney, Australia who asked: What are some of the metrics that Google uses to evaluate whether one iteration […]

US Court Says Baidu Has Free Speech Right To Censor Search
Late last week, Chinese search engine Baidu succeeded in gaining dismissal of a lawsuit by pro-democracy activists based in New York (Zhang et al. v. Baidu.com, Inc). Plaintiffs had sued in the US and argued that Baidu improperly blocked them from seeing content on the search engine. Specifically, according to Reuters, the plaintiffs said that people in the US couldn’t […]

An Open Letter From Google To Local Directory Sites (Parody)
To: Local Directories From: Google Re: Local Search Rankings Hey guys… You may have noticed that over the past year, a lot of the organic traffic to your sites has been… well, we guess the right word is “tanking.” As you know, it is our […]

Google Webmaster Tools Index Status Showing Data For HTTPS Protocol
Google has announced they’ve added “more precise” data for the Index Status reports in Google Webmaster Tools. Specifically, Google is now reporting each indexed URLs for each protocol, specifically both for HTTP and HTTPS, as well as for verified subdirectories. Google said this change “makes it easy for you to monitor different sections of your […]

Climbing The Ladder To Guest Posting On Tier 1 Sites
Content marketing is all the rage these days and, if you are pursuing guest posts as part of your link-building strategy, it is critical to target the highest authority sites possible. You want to find the sites where your presence builds your visibility and reputation (regardless of SEO) and where the links might get clicked […]

Microsoft Bing Testing Showing “Alternative” Search Engines In Search Results
We’ve seen how Google may display competitive search engines in their search results, based on an EU antitrust settlement. But how will it look for Bing if they did the same thing? Aaron Wall at SEO Book posted a screen shot of what he saw Bing testing around displaying “alternative” results in the Bing search […]

Survey: Search Engines Dominate Mobile Product Research
Last week, Local Corporation released survey results from its latest round of consumer mobile shopping research. The company is promoting a new version of its local-mobile shopping app Havvit. The survey was conducted in March and carried out by the Chicago-based e-tailing group and consisted of nearly 1,300 US smartphone owners. Among other questions the […]

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